HomeServe: Upgrading the home repair experience to create trust and empower customers
About HomeServe
HomeServe France makes home repairs and improvements easy through home assistance and repair policies, on-demand services for small repairs or emergencies, and home renovation services.
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About Devoteam G Cloud
Google Cloud pure player for over 10 years, Devoteam G Cloud helps companies in their transformation journey thanks to Google Cloud ecosystem (Google Workspace, Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, devices, etc). With more than 1,300 customers and one million users. For more information, visit: https://gcloud.devoteam.com/
HomeServe France increases agility and customer responsiveness by automating low-level infrastructure management with Google Kubernetes Engine and building a new Google Cloud-powered data platform.
Google Cloud results
- Maximizes productivity by automating low-level infrastructure management
- Enables developers to switch easily between multiple development and production environments, reducing time to market for new features
- Reduces onboarding time for new developers from a week to half a day
- Delivers customer insights to create a more unique and individualized client experience
Increases deployments from monthly to several per week
In the crowded home repair industry, trust is the key to long-term success. Homeowners and tenants open their homes to strangers, often based on nothing more than a local advertisement or a hurried internet search. That’s where HomeServe France comes in, bringing much-needed predictability and reliability to an industry where pricing models are often opaque. The company has an 18-year heritage of providing its customers with quick, affordable, reliable solutions for their homes, and delivering high-quality customer service at every step of the journey.
HomeServe France matches clients with its own certified network of engineers to offer a centralized source of affordable policies for customers who need assistance and advice on plumbing, electrical, gas, and heating and cooling, as well as home appliance and connected devices. Collaborating with its engineer network, HomeServe France completes more than 190,000 home repairs a year—one home fixed every three minutes—and more than a million customers across France use its platform for emergency, installation, and renovation services.
“Our main business challenge is to develop products in a more agile way. To do that, we’re deploying agile methods not just in the IT department, but across the whole company, which enables us to really focus on the product.”
—Franck Bonnassieux, CTO, HomeServe FranceTo connect this large customer base to its network of more than 3,000 engineers in an increasingly fragmented market, HomeServe needs to offer a seamless customer experience from the initial contact to any follow-up appointments, to build customer trust in their services. Facing this challenge head on, the company decided to rebuild its infrastructure for maximum agility.
“Our main business challenge is to develop products in a more agile way. To do that, we’re deploying agile methods not just in the IT department, but across the whole company, which enables us to really focus on the product,” says Franck Bonnassieux, CTO at HomeServe France.
With Google Cloud, Homeserve has reinvented itself as a more agile provider, aiming for a 100% cloud-based IT solution. “We want to be cloud first, for any needs and any application,” says Franck.
Maximizing productivity for developers with Google Kubernetes Engine
After years of growth, HomeServe’s on-premises infrastructure had become an impediment to progress and customer satisfaction. Developers were spending too much time on basic tasks, hurting turnaround on new and improved features. Customer-centric applications couldn’t run with 100% availability, which is absolutely crucial in home repair emergencies.
Rather than merely rehost or drop and shop, the IT department began to completely refactor and replatform its digital factory. To train its employees and audit changes, HomeServe teamed up with Devoteam and Cirruseo, building on their advice to fully manage the actual migration process internally.
With a new infrastructure relying heavily on containerization, HomeServe uses Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to manage its clusters, enabling developers to focus on the tasks where they really provide value. The seamless experience allows developers to switch effortlessly between development and production environments, trusting GKE to automate cumbersome infrastructure management.
“We really want to use the cloud on high-level services and not manage low-level infrastructure. And for that, Google Cloud has really been focused on the developer experience, compared to other leading providers,” says Franck. “Google was the natural choice, as it was the creator of Kubernetes.”
The automated management of low-level infrastructure offered by Google Cloud helps to enhance protection against security threats related to the operating system or Kubernetes patches that would otherwise require developer attention. “In that case, a public provider like Google is so much more powerful than we will ever be,” says Franck. “Google is a more secure choice than on-prem for us.”
“Using containerization and managed clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine has huge value for us. It gives us the ability to test any new feature in a few clicks, either in a test environment, or in production.”
—Franck Bonnassieux, CTO, HomeServe FranceDriving deployment agility in an increasingly dynamic market
Once slowed down by an infrastructure limiting the company’s ability to react, the new, more agile HomeServe tests and implements new features in a continuous integration and deployment chain, due to GKE and the switch to a DevOps mentality.
“Using containerization and managed clusters on Google Kubernetes Engine has huge value for us,” says Franck. “It gives us the ability to test any new feature in a few clicks, either in a test environment, or in production.”
With significantly shortened lead times and a new business application that is scalable by design, HomeServe rose up to the challenges of its fast-paced industry with an agile new feature-based approach, using GKE. “In our previous version of our website, we were deploying to production maybe once a month. And now we have several deployments per week.”
HomeServe’s new harmonized development environment vastly improved the onboarding process of new developers as well, reducing the time to set up a full development toolset from a week to half a day.
“With higher deployment frequency, we’re now proposing new solutions and features to our customers very quickly. This vastly improves our ability to try, test, fail, learn, and repeat this process. Google Kubernetes Engine is really an enabler for us to meet and build the needs of our customers.”
—Franck Bonnassieux, CTO, HomeServe FranceMaintaining a trust experience between customers and providers
To enable a more event-driven architecture, HomeServe uses Pub/Sub. For complex processes such as connecting events to the company’s ETL solution, Google Cloud Support provided assistance on the way.
HomeServe’s new agility allows the company to better predict and fulfill the needs of its customers, which include both the technicians in its network and the tenants and homeowners relying on their services. The GKE-powered, API-based infrastructure enables easy plug and play of HomeServe’s network of technicians to digital intermediation platforms.
In the households relying on HomeServe, the improved platform streamlines the customer journey, providing a seamless experience from initial contact to repairs, billing, signatures, follow-ups, and any other interactions between clients, technicians, and customer service. “With higher deployment frequency, we’re now proposing new solutions and features to our customers very quickly,” says Franck. “This vastly improves our ability to try, test, fail, learn, and repeat this process. Google Kubernetes Engine is really an enabler for us to meet and build the needs of our customers.”
Building a real-time data platform to individualize the customer journey
As well as automating infrastructure, HomeServe is building a new data platform, leveraging the Google Cloud data toolkit. “Our new data platform exploits Cloud Storage as a data lake, as well as BigQuery for data warehouse or data mart purposes, and both are valued for abstracting computing and storage-related issues that we faced previously with our legacy data platform. Having our data stored on Google Cloud also allows us to leverage machine learning features directly on the platform, either by using bigquery-ml/docs or using Datalab to create interactive notebooks. Finally, Data Catalog is used for data mapping and for adding key metadata, enabling data discovery through all internal departments.” With Cloud Composer, the company is replacing all internal workflow schedulers. All of HomeServe’s databases are provided in a PaaS model with Google Cloud Databases.
Striving for a unified data management framework with benefits such as synchronous communication between all its business applications, HomeServe is investing in Google Cloud data solutions now to meet the future needs of its customers. “The idea is to provide more insight and propose a specific journey to any customer,” says Franck. “The main goal of the data platform is to enter into more relational and specialized marketing with any of our customers based on what we know about them and the interaction we have with them.”
Moving forward, HomeServe is preparing its new data platform for the switch from proof-of-concept-mode to real use cases. The reinvention is an ongoing, step-by-step process, with Google Cloud as a steady partner. “We have a huge challenge on data,” says Franck. “We are completely rebuilding our data platform. And for that, Google Cloud really offers the best solutions.”
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About HomeServe
HomeServe France makes home repairs and improvements easy through home assistance and repair policies, on-demand services for small repairs or emergencies, and home renovation services.
About Devoteam G Cloud
Google Cloud pure player for over 10 years, Devoteam G Cloud helps companies in their transformation journey thanks to Google Cloud ecosystem (Google Workspace, Google Cloud, Google Maps Platform, devices, etc). With more than 1,300 customers and one million users. For more information, visit: https://gcloud.devoteam.com/